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This book was prompted by engineers, scientists, and hardware managers who attended short courses held on CCD and CMOS imagers at UCLA Extension, SPIE conferences, and various seminars. Roughly 20% of course material presented is typically allocated to the photon transfer characterization technique necessary to set the stage for other sessions that require its application. Course evaluation forms generated by students requested more in-depth discussions about the measurement standard, and they suggested that a reference book on photon transfer be written. Encouraged by these recommendations, after 25 years of teaching these courses, this short book finally materialized.
Photon Transfer is designed for a wide audience—from the novice to the advanced user already familiar with the method. For first-time users, the book’s primary purpose is to give sufficient guidelines to accurately generate, calibrate, and understand imaging data products made through the photon transfer method. With this goal in mind, Chapters 2–4 represent background and theoretical material necessary to fundamentally demonstrate how the technique works. Chapter 5 then discusses the mechanics of generating photon transfer curves before proceeding into more-complex photon transfer products.
Experienced users may find the material presented in Chapters 6–12 to be new territory. As this book was written, the author discovered many new photon transfer characteristics, even after more than 30 years of previous study and use (e.g., Chapter 7 on the subject of V/e− nonlinearity, Chapter 8 on flat fielding, and Chapter 9 on the modulation photon transfer curve). It is likely that readers will also discover new ways to apply photon transfer on future imaging technologies and applications.
The book contains more than 230 figures that present experimental CCD and CMOS data products and modeling simulations connected to photon transfer. Contents also provide hundreds of relations that support photon transfer theory, simulations, and data presented. For the more-important equations, 57 example problems are presented to demonstrate how the relations are used. Appendix A presents a spreadsheet of experimental CMOS data used to exercise the photon transfer method and produce numerous products and transfer curves. Appendices B–D present example computer photon transfer simulation programs utilized throughout the book.
The author would like to acknowledge Margaret Thayer, Timothy Lamkins,
and Scott Schrum of SPIE for giving life to my English. Thanks goes to Joseph Altebrando and Rich Lobdill for first seeing and reacting with welcomed criticisms to the manuscript. I wish to express my thanks to Tom Elliott for helping me pioneer—over the many years we have worked together—the photon transfer technique and the presented x-ray data products. I especially want to thank my wife Linda and daughter Amanda, my sister Barb, and Mom and Dad for their timely support in many ways.
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